The Fine Art of Software Delivery

I’ve just wasted four hours of my life i will not get back. What did i do you, you ask? Easy: i tried to upgrade my Delphi 2007 test VM to the latest and greatest CodeGear produce.

This is a clean VM we’re talking about. Fresh install of Windows XP SP2 with latest Updates. Snapsot. Clone. Fresh Install of Delphi 2007 MK-1. Snapshot. Updated to Delphi 2007 Update 2 some months ago. Snapshot. All had been working fine (or at least, as fine as one has come to expect).

12:00 PM: Booting up. Dragging RadStudio2007Setup.exe over. Running. Entering new Serial; selecting upgrade. OK.

12:05 PM: Noticing my overall system is anything but performant. Indeed, setup inside the VM is managing to drag down the entire 2×4,4GHz, 4GB system with it. Apparently doing nothing.

12:30 PM: Setup (or so foolish me thinks) is finally starting to copy files. At least that’s what it looks like – the status panel is rapidly (yet somehow incredibly slowly) showing filename after filename.

12:45 PM: Can’t be long now. How many files could setup possibly have to copy, after all?

13:30 PM: Incredibly enough, setup is now starting to download files. What is that you’re saying? Wasn’t it already installing before? Well, apparently not.

14:30 PM: Setup is still downloading. Setup is also still bigging down the entire system, making it still unusable. Going off to my MacBook to get some stuff done in the meantime

15:00 PM: Checking back for status: Still downloading, and the entire desktop is covered with .7zip files. Of course. Where else would you put temp files, if not on the desktop! How silly of me.

15:15 PM: Apparently done downloading, and installing now (but then, we though it was doing that last week). System still slow as molasses, of course. Teaches me for not buying state of the art hardware.

15:50 PM: Setup done. Repeat: Setup done. Launching!

15:52 PM: Completing Registration and Activaton form. Subitting

15:55 PM: Spash Screen “C++BUILDER”. Huh?

15:56 PM: Exception EPackageRegistrationException in module coreide100.bpl at 000DA029.<br></br> Registration procedure, Dotnetreg.IDERegister in package c:\program files\codegear\rad studio\5.0\Bin\dotnetcoreide100.bpl raised exception class EOleSysError: Unspecified error, ClassID: {88487704-983C-4811-A96A-3DA723DD97AF}.

Do you want to attempt to load this IDE package the next time CodeGear RAD Studio for Microsoft Windows is run?

Selecting “Whatever”

15:59 PM: IDE comes up, “Delphi for Win32”. I thought (from the splash) it launched C++Builder. Weird. Let’s restart

16:03 PM: Splash screen “RAD STUDIO 2007”. Better! better?

16:03:20 PM: Failure to load “Together” package. Ignore. Whatever. Who Cares! I don’t need Together!

16:03:35 PM: Access Violation. process is gone

16:04 PM: Launching again

16:05 PM: Some OTHER package failure. Then the XP “Has encountered a problem” dialog

16:06 PM: Pressing “Reset to Snapshot” button in VMware.

So glad i didn’t have anything better to do, today.